Introduction

Today's lesson will show you how to add dialog boxes to your application. In Windows-based applications, dialog boxes are used to prompt the user for data needed by the application to continue or to display information to the user. Dialog boxes are a specialized type of form object that can be created in one of three ways:

• Predefined dialog boxes can be created from code using the MsgBox or InputBox functions.
• Customized dialog boxes can be created using a standard form or by customizing an existing dialog box.
• Standard dialog boxes, such as Print and File Open, can be created using the common dialog control.

In this chapter, we will take advantage of a special control called the Common Dialog Box control, which produces six different common dialog boxes.

The common dialog control provides a standard set of dialog boxes for operations such as opening and saving files, setting print options, and selecting colors and fonts.

The dialog boxes that the Common dialog box control produce are modal.

A modal dialog box is one that the user must close before he or she can continue working with the rest of the application.

The common dialog control allows you to display these commonly used dialog boxes:

• Open
• Save As
• Color
• Font
• Print
• WinHelp